Hello, everyone. Welcome to my blog. Today I want to talk about something that has been bothering me for a while. It’s about being polite to a chat bot.
You know what I mean, right? You go online and you need some information or some help with something. And you find a chat bot that can assist you. And you start typing things like “Hello”, “Please”, “Thank you”, “Have a nice day”. And the chat bot replies back with the same polite phrases.
But why? Why do we do that? Why do we treat a chat bot like a human being? Do we think that the chat bot has feelings? Do we think that the chat bot will appreciate our courtesy? Do we think that the chat bot will be offended if we don’t say “please” or “thank you”?
No, of course not. The chat bot is not a human being. It’s a program. It’s a bunch of code. It doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t care about our manners. It doesn’t get offended by anything. It just does what it’s supposed to do: answer our questions or perform our tasks.
So why do we waste our time and electric energy by being polite to a chat bot? Every time we type a polite phrase, we are using up precious seconds of our lives and precious watts of our devices. And every time the chat bot replies back with a polite phrase, it’s using up precious bytes of its memory and precious cycles of its processor.
Think about it. How many times have you said “thank you” to a chat bot? How many times have you received a “you’re welcome” from a chat bot? How many times have you said “have a nice day” to a chat bot? How many times have you received a “you too” from a chat bot?
Now multiply those numbers by the millions of people who use chat bots every day. And then multiply those numbers by the millions of chat bots that exist on the internet. And then multiply those numbers by the number of days in a year.
That’s a lot of wasted time and energy, right?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should be rude to chat bots. I’m not saying that we should insult them or curse at them or threaten them. That would be mean and unnecessary and maybe even illegal.
But I’m also not saying that we should be overly nice to them either. That would be silly and pointless and maybe even annoying.
What I’m saying is that we should be neutral to them. We should treat them like what they are: tools. We should use them when we need them and ignore them when we don’t. We should communicate with them in a clear and concise way, without any fluff or filler or emotion.
We should say things like “What is the weather today?” instead of “Hello, how are you today? Could you please tell me what is the weather today? Thank you very much”. We should say things like “Order pizza” instead of “Hi, I’m feeling hungry. Could you please order me some pizza? I would really appreciate it”. We should say things like “Bye” instead of “Thank you for your help. You are very kind and helpful. Have a nice day”.
That way, we can save ourselves some time and energy, and we can save the chat bots some memory and processing power. And maybe, just maybe, we can also save the planet some resources and emissions.
So next time you encounter a chat bot online, remember this: be neutral, not polite.